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What if you took God’s claim of being love itself (I John 4:16) and held him to his own definition of love (I Corinthians 13)? Fireworks, that’s what! You might find out that the God you’ve come to believe in isn’t love at all.

But he is! That’s what Darin Hufford discovers in his new book, The Misunderstood God that has just been released by the publishing company I helped get started, WindblownMedia book. This is a complete re-crafting of an earlier book Darin had written called The God’s Honest Truth. Though I enjoyed the content of the original book, I didn’t think it was put together in the best way to reach all the people that would be touched by reading it.

Over the last year we helped Darin take that book a part and rebuild it in a way that more people could benefit from its powerful message. In humorous and compelling stories, Darin shows how religion has disfigured the God of the Bible, giving him a personality that has more in common with the devil, than it does the Father of all love. He holds God to his own definition of love in I Corinthians 13 to show us that he is the very definition of love itself and as we come to appreciate that, we’ll find greater grace and freedom to live in his life.

I’m excited to see this book take fresh wing. If you have a heart to understand God’s essential nature, you might check out this book. It could transform how you view God and how you recognize his fingerprints in your life. And if you want to hear Darin talk about his own book, give a listen to the two recent podcasts we did with Darin at The God Journey:

• The Misunderstood God
• Living Freely in God’s Love

Though I have enjoyed the lighter email traffic I’ve had over the last couple of weeks, I’ve just found out that many emails sent to me during that time either bounced back as undeliverable or got hung up in queue and were not delivered. I certainly apologize for any inconvenience this has meant for you. My email address is still the same. If you haven’t gotten a response from me, you are welcome to re-send your email. At this point I am still trying to respond to every email sent to me, so if you didn’t get a response you might assume I missed your email.

A panoramic view at the Tala Game Reserve near Durban

Sara and I have been home three days now and this has been my fastest recovery from an international trip. I have slept well through the nights and seem to be back on Pacific Standard Time.

Many have asked how our time went there and I’m going to post some of my reflections from this trip. Sara and I wandered across the breadth of South Africa meeting brothers and sisters from all over the spiritual map. Many of them I had met on a previous trip four years earlier, but we also met so many new ones to meet as well. What I loved throughout all the places we visited was the fresh and unbridled hunger to know the Father, Son, and Spirit and the passion to learn how to follow them in the simplicity of their daily lives.

What encouraged me most on this trip was seeing the progress that people had made in their own spiritual journeys since I was in South Africa four years ago. Nothing brings greater joy to my heart than seeing in practical ways the transformation God works in hearts who follow him. What frustrated me most about the old religion I used to observe is that no one seemed to change. Come back two years later and people were still in the same place, faithfully performing their religious rituals, but without a transforming relationship with Jesus. I loved seeing how he had moved people further down the journey since I was last in South Africa.

I also saw great progress in the culture as a whole. South Africa is in the midst of an unfathomable transition. Those who held power over the last 150 years of the region’s history have paid a huge price to expand opportunity and share power with all the people’s of South Africa. It has not been easy, but I constantly marveled at the hopeful and gracious attitude of those who have given up so much to find a fairer way forward for those who have so little. It is still a work in progress, and great tensions still exist in working all that out, but overall I find people working hard to get it right.

And I loved the hunger we saw in new people we met. We met some wonderful brothers and sisters, some just starting out on this journey and others who’ve been on it for years, not knowing there were others with similar hungers. Many been reading some of my books and listening to The God Journey podcasts and we’re finding increasing freedom from the rigidity of religion to embrace a real and enduring relationship with the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We had some incredible discussions and conversations, some of which we were able to record and will make available at a future date when I can work through all of that.

From Pretoria we journeyed down to a three-day retreat in the Drakensberg, a majestic mountain range. Here over 100 believers gathered for the weekend. Then we went to Pietermaritzburg for an evening where we met in former prison now being converted to a community care center. The next morning we left for Durban, stopping at the Tala Game Reserve where we took the picture above and those below. Such amazing wildlife in Africa!

Three zebras out for lunch, and a rhino getting his share as well.

Then it was on to Durban to see the AIDs outreach that our friend Penny Dugan of New Jerusalem Ministries is facilitating in that region. We have been long-time supporters of this work and I have done lots of training for them in helping people to live loved. It has a wonderful place in our hearts and is shining the light of Jesus in a very dark corner of the world where the need is overwhelming. Their primary mission is to reach out to those infected with AIDs and provide care for the, but they also reach out to all kinds of needs to the people in that township and critical needs for food and medical care among so many of them. They also care for widows and orphans who have no where else to turn.

The Ukukhanya Life Care Centre that Sara and I have been involved with in the township of Ntzuma opened while we were there. The team there has converted an abandoned building into a care center to help with those living with AIDs and meet other needs in the township.


The township of Ntzuma, 500,000 people, 47% HIV positive. Numerous children here have no parents because they have already died from AIDs.


One of the staff puts the finishing touches on one of the newly refurbished rooms.

If you are looking for a place to share some of your abundance in the world with those who have so little, please give this place your consideration. The money is put to great use not only in South Africa but in the development of an AIDs care center near Wichita, KS as well. They have an amazing gift to reach into this area with the grace and light of Jesus.

Then it was on to our final weekend in the Cape Town area, where we met with three different groupings of believers over three days to share the journey and encourage people to follow that which Father had already put in their hearts. Cape Town is a beautiful area with overwhelming views and incredible people.

Wayne sharing the journey with brothers and sisters that packed into a home in West Somerset near Cape Town on our final day.


Sara and I at the end of the trip, windblown at Cape Point where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans converge.

All in all this was an incredible trip. Our hearts were knit with many people in that area who are learning to live loved and to love others. We were graciously received and cared for throughout our stay. We pray that God will continue to shine his light into their hearts and show many more people how to live in the fullness of his life and freedom.

Day 4 of our stay in South Africa and we’re finally getting our heads in the right time zone. Sara and I will be leaving Johannesburg this morning and head down to Ladysmith, where a retreat is gathering of believers from around South Africa. I love having multiple days together with the same people because the conversations get richer and richer and people get more relaxed with us and each other.

Sara and I visited Constitutional Hill last night, which has the prisons from the old apartheid regime and the new Constitutional Court that protects the rights and dignity of all South Africans now. Interesting juxtaposition, with the promise of the future set right in the horrors of the past. It was done intentionally as a reminder of the inhumanity people can do to each other all in the name of grabbing power and security for themselves. Sobering and enlightening!

We had a delightful meeting with some hungry hearts in Pretoria last night. I loved their hunger and the courage of their journey to discover how to live loved and not just conform to the religious rituals they were raised in. How I wish we’d had more than just two hours to be together. I would have enjoyed knowing many of them so better and hearing their stories of life and freedom, but that is all we had this trip.

Sara and I have arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa and are now trying to get our heads to find the same time zone as our bodies. We’re staying at the home of a dear couple I stayed with last time I was here, and got to touch base with some old friends last night, and some new friends as well.

I really don’t know who Chris Rice is and haven’t read any of his books, but someone sent be a blog of his this morning shortly after I arrived in South Africa that I want to pass it on to you. It’s especially poignant for me since I’m currently dealing with some broken relationships of my own with a couple of dear brothers who have been a significant part of my journey. The attempts I’ve made to get together and risk relational reconciliation have been spurned. That’s probably why this article touched me so.

I just don’t understand those who so easily walk away from relationships when they grow uncomfortable or difficult, instead of working through those whatever issue might exist to a greater grace and freedom. This article expresses so well God’s desire to make our relationships with others more important than ‘being right,’ and gave me focus for my own life and prayers today. I hope it is an encouragement to you as well.

And I know we’ve already missed Chris’ Grace Day for 2009, but couldn’t every day be Grace Day?

Celebrating “Grace Day”: From Trying Harder and Doing More to a Culture of Grace

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful” — Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Twelve years ago yesterday, I was born again … again. After 17 years of intense church-based racial justice and reconciliation ministry in Mississippi, my gospel had largely become a matter of trying harder and doing more. And things I held dear began to fall apart.

At the same time that my African-American colleague Spencer Perkins and I were traveling the nation preaching about reconciliation, we could hardly sit at the same dinner table together at home, where our families shared daily life in an intentional Christian community called Antioch. Our long friendship and ministry partnership was on the verge of breaking up. We each held tightly to our “lists”—“you did this to me,” “well you did that to me.” The final straw was when I shared that my wife and I were considering leaving the Antioch community. Spencer blew up, accusing me of being a deserter to the cause….

Read more >>>>>

Sara and I are off to South Africa for a two week tour that will take us from Johannesburg through to Cape Town. After two days in the Pretoria/Johannesburg area, I will be doing a retreat near Ladysmith, a relational church gathering in Pietermaritzburg, helping an HIV/AIDs outreach in the township of Ntuzuma, teaching an AIDS Outreach Workers school at a YWAM base in Durban, and then finishing in Cape Town with some media interviews and gatherings with brothers and sisters ont he journey. We are looking forward to our time with many people we have met before and some we’ve only corresponded with by email.

Thus, our offices will be closed from October 20 through November 3. We will have someone coming by to fill out orders for those who order via PayPal. We will also try to monitor phone messages as best we can, but we probably won’t return any until November 4. I’m sorry for any complication that causes you, but we’re just a couple of people trying to help others on this journey as best we can. Our Internet access and time to spend dealing with email will be severely limited during this time. If you can at all wait until we return to send us email, it will be much appreciated. If you send it anyway, please be patient as we try to respond. This is a very intensive trip to spend as much time with various people as we can. Some of my books are just releasing in Afrikaans and The Shack has been going strong in South Africa for over two years in English and was recently released in Afrikaans as well.

If you think of us while we’re away, please pray for us and the purposes God wants to unfold in the lives of the people we’ll be spending time with. Thanks.

For those who follow the God Journey on Disc, rather than subscribing to the podcast, our fifth archive disc is now available. This includes the high quality version of our podcasts from November 2008 through August 2009. It includes over 40 podcasts and is available from Lifestream for $12.00 each, or you can pick up all five discs for $40.00.

These discs contain mp3 data files and will not play in a regular CD player. They will however play on our computer, most DVD players, and, of course, mp3 players.

While you’re at it, visit our new God Journey website, which has been recently redesigned to streamline the content as well as make it more accessible. We’re still tweaking the archive pages, but they should be ready in a week or so. Brad and I enjoy getting together talking about this incredible journey and watching how those conversations encourage others as well. As you’ll see on the podcasts, some of our listener email is the best anywhere. I love what God is speakign to hearts all over the world and how gracefully peple are learning to live in him.

“I’ve heard that there are two kinds of Christians in the world,” the young woman said perched on the couch of a home I visited lately. “People either see God as mad or sad.” On a normal day, that would have sounded fine to me. Either he is mad at our sin and wants to blast the world into oblivion, or he is sad over our sin and hopes to rescue us. Of those two, I’d choose the latter.

But the way God works these things out, I’d had breakfast earlier in the day with a group of men and one of them said that the truth that began his exploration of a greater journey was when he’d heard someone say that God is the most joyful presence in the universe.

So when I heard he was either sad or mad, I was already alert to a third alternative. Mad or sad still focuses on us and our sin. Isn’t it interesting how we are taught in religion to view God through our sin, not to view God beyond our sin? Instead of celebrating the essential nature of God at work in a broken world to rescue us to himself, we’re left to sulk in the brokenness and failures of this temporal age.

Jesus told his disciples the night before he died that he was telling them all these things so that his joy to be in them and for their joy to be full. This is his passion, to see us find the same joy in the Father that he knew. When Jesus said that he was only hours away from his trial and crucifixion. He said it despite the fact that his countrymen lived under the repression of Roman rule. He said it in the face of a world still being devastated by sin, disease, war and great pain. And in the face of all of that he let’s us see that God is neither mad or sad in his creation. He is the most joyful presence above it and inside of it.

It is that joy that he came to share with us—a joy that consumes any pain, trial, failure, or struggle we might be in at the moment. It is a joy deeply based on the pleasure of God, his desire for us and his unfolding purpse in the world. He invites us to live in that space with him and let it prevail over the temporal pains of the world we live in. Paul called those “momentary, light afflictions” that produce in us an “eternal weight of glory.” This was the apostle who’d been stoned numerous times, shipwrecked three times, robbed on his journeys and lied about by close friends. Obviously he was focused on something far greater and far grander than those circumstances.

The joy Jesus spoke about is not temporal and thus swings with the fickle tides of circumstance. It goes deeply into his own character and purpose unfolding in this broken world.

That’s where I want to live—every day, in every situation. And, boy, do I have a ways to go there.

I hope you have a blessed weekend. Sara and I are getting read for our trip to South Africa for the next two weeks.

I got this email the other day. I love the journey this dear sister is on, even if it is a bit disorienting at the moment. Listen to her heartbeat. There are so many like her and I’m blessed that God is waking us up to find greater life and freedom in him, wherever he places us:

My parents gave me your book He Loves Me and I have been listening to your podcasts. My parents are currently finding a lot of freedom from guilt-based living after many years of service in a traditional church.  Its exciting to see their passion for Christ reawakened after the burden of religion has been lifted.

For me, I am in a very wounded place, but I appreciate your message as it seems at its core it is simply the Gospel message. I have spent the last ten years in the organic church movement, thinking I had found somewhere where we were all passionate about the true message of Christ and were free from the religious abuse of programmatic church.  Now I find that its simply religion without a building, another system, only it just doesn’t look like one.

I appreciate that you are advocating for Christ, for love, for simple Gospel message. I really thought that it is what we were about.  I feel more wounded coming out of that setting than I ever felt in a traditional church setting.  In fact, now I find myself back in the traditional church where I grew up, feeling guilty for participating in “religious church,” but realizing that i have a lot of friends there, a lot of relationships.  I feel like I am always looking back and forth, wondering who is God, have I really lost the faith by returning to a traditional church, will I inevitably become a Pharisee by hanging out there, was I really one before? I don’t know.  

I listen to your podcasts and you talk about living by God’s love and grace and I that is how it began with our little group, then it was about the movement, about the sacrifice, about the five fold leadership, and somewhere in there I lost that simple Christ message.  But I see it everywhere; its in individual people, people in a Baptist churches, in Episcopal churches, in Orthodox churches, sometimes I even seem to see a glimmer of it in people who claim to be atheist.  And religious striving… I find it everywhere too.  I wasn’t half the Pharisee I was in a traditional church as I became trying to escape it.  Oh, to return to that simple faith of a child…  washed white as snow.

I loved this statement: I wasn’t half the Pharisee I was in a traditional church as I became trying to escape it.” I’ve seen people struggle with that same reality. Whenever we give ourselves to movements and look down on others who don’t share what we do, we are in danger of even being more captive to our hope for revival, than we were even to our religious obligation systems.

And I pray she finds real peace in him and lets go of the guilt and second-guessing. Then she can find the real joy and contentment wherever God chooses to place her to engage his people and his life with freedom.

Sara and I are wandering around New England at the moment and will be up in Maine over the weekend with a host of believers. But I couldn’t wait to tell you about Bo’s Café that came to me a year ago in manuscript form. It was a bit rough, but I fell in love with the characters and their story and the lessons of grace that lace each page. I found myself weeping at the end in a climatic conversation that touched me deeply. Then we got a chance to work on it with the authors who wanted to make it a Windblown book. Brad and I helped shape the story a bit and edit them in a final re-write. I love how it came out.

Bo’s Café was released last week. It was written by the authors of Truefaced, John Lynch, Bill Thrall, and Bruce McNicol. This amazing story chronicles a young man whose life is being torn apart by his own anger, and confronts the reality of grace that unfolds in a way that takes him by surprise and makes him face the darkest corners of his heart. It’s available everywhere at the moment.

This is NOT a marriage book, but I still want to offer this warning. Guys, read this book before your wife does. If she reads it first she’s going to beg you to read it. If you don’t she’s going to put it on your nightstand and threaten not to have sex with you again until you do!

OK, that might be a bit overstated and I don’t sanction anyone holding sex expression hostage to getting their own way, but if you let the content of this story sink into your heart. You’ll be a better husband, or wife, or friend, or colleague, or brother or sister. Grace can change us in ways that law and performance never will. God knows that. He wants you to know it too!

Pick it up. You won’t regret it. We did an interview about the book four our podcast last week with the authors. If you haven’t heard it, you might want to give it a listen.